“Anita was very good to me, and so was Druze. It was only then I discovered that Druze was a woman. I had to pay for it afterward--Druze’s knowledge, I mean. I don’t really remember the child--only just that vague, queer impression like the elusive memory of a dream. Peter, be a little pitiful. I was in a terrible condition; my father was writing, asking me to make up my mind about Raytham. You knew he wanted to marry me? Raytham had lent Father a lot of money, and I was afraid, terribly afraid, of what would happen if Father came to learn--about the marriage and everything. “He knew I’d been to America, of course; I was supposed to have taken an engagement to sing--you remember that, don’t you, Peter? But he didn’t know I’d returned, or what had become of me. I had to send all my letters to a friend in New York to be posted back to him.” She stopped. “Where is the child? That is all I want to know.” She shook her head. “Druze knew. She told me something just before she went out; she had been drinking, Peter. She told me a ghastly thing.” Her voice broke. “Terrible, terrible!” She covered her eyes again, and he waited, his heart a heavy stone. “This ghastly thing; what was it?” he asked at last. “She said”--this needed courage to think, it was a torture to say--“that even she didn’t know where the child was; that she had handed the boy to the first person who, for a consideration, offered to adopt it; and all the time I had been comforting myself with the thought that--that he at least was being brought up happily, however much a blackguard his foster father was.” “What do you mean?” he demanded. “I’ve been paying money, big sums of money,” she said at last, “as I supposed to the man who had adopted him, and who, learning of my marriage to Raytham, had for years blackmailed me. Too late I discovered that this blackmailer was mythical, that it was Druze who was robbing me all the time.” Peter drew a deep breath. “How awful! How perfectly awful!” he whispered. “Just disappeared into the mass--and you allowed him to go. I can’t understand that. I thought that women----” She stopped him with a weary gesture. “I don’t understand women, either. I wish I’d kept him and had faced all the trouble that would have followed. You know about it for the first time, Peter, and you have the support of your righteousness. It has been a bad dream to me--an eight-year long discomfort. And now it is a nightmare.” She pressed her throbbing temples. “I can’t sleep for thinking of him. That little mite of a boy--my boy and yours--perhaps being starved, or dead perhaps, or suffering----” She screwed her eyes tight as though to shut out a horrible vision. “Does Bellini know?” He was like ice now. “Anita?” She looked at him in surprise. “No; why should she? You hate Anita, of course. I’m not really--fond of her. She’s difficult. But she was very helpful to me, Peter.” He looked at her steadily. “Who was Martha?”